[Mainan_Tagonist]

ps: just want to point out that i'm not being snarky, just asking a question in good faith. I heard more than once on TV (incidentally by critics of the catholic church), that Copernicus or Galileo had been burnt at the stake for proving that "the earth wasn't flat".

Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role as history books or formal education in knowledge acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question whether "the average person" is a valid point of reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges of discoveries.

[LegionMammal978]

It's odd how far people have run with simplified versions of Galileo's story. The version I've seen everywhere is "The dastardly anti-science Church hated heliocentrism so much that it persecuted Galileo for it." The Church's support of geocentrism did play a role, but if you look at the details, it seems far closer to "The Roman Church of Galileo's day was filled with scheming politicians, and he (perhaps unwittingly) offended people who he couldn't afford to, so his enemies latched onto his support for heliocentrism as an excuse to get rid of him."

These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of telephone between people who want history to prove their point.

[elmomle]

I can't speak to any very recent changes (I'm doubtful anything's changed massively, I could be wrong), but I was educated in the US and went to highly selective schools--and it was only in an obscure, elective history of science class fairly late in my college career that I learned about al-Haytham (who was called Alhazen in the class). Meanwhile, I (and many of my HS classmates) could have told you that Copernicus pioneered a heliocentric model of the solar system, or about Newton's laws of motion, etc., when we were 15.

The Renaissance really was taught as "Europeans rediscovered the great classical thinkers", and it was only through my own curiosity that I learned that Islamic science played a key role.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

Here in France, we were taught from fairly early on about Averroes and Avicenne (Ibn Sinna) for instance. There may geographical and societal reasons for these differences, but all in all that's besides the point i was trying to make, which is : The average person may have heard of Newton, Darwin and others, but how many could really explain the theory of gravity or that of evolution without getting at least some of it wrong?

("Gravity... ha yes, the guy with the apple","evolution... sure, we all are descended from apes, right?")

...Therefore, relying on what the average person may know to discuss whether something is publicly acknowledged and understood is perhaps the wrong way to go about this.